Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Tuesday October 28, 2008 @01:01PM
from the only-a-matter-of-time dept.

A Cow writes "The Tribler BitTorrent client, a project run by researchers from several European universities and Harvard, is the first to incorporate decentralized search capabilities. With Tribler, users can now find .torrent files that are hosted among other peers, instead of on a centralized site such as The Pirate Bay or Mininova.
The Tribler developers have found a way to make their client work without having to rely on BitTorrent sites. Although others have tried to come up with similar solutions, such as the Cubit plugin for Vuze, Tribler is the first to understand that with decentralized BitTorrent search, there also has to be a way to moderate these decentralized torrents in order to avoid a flood of spam."

Posted
by
Zonk
on Thursday March 29, 2007 @12:47PM
from the frodo-you-go-nowhere dept.

Gamasutra has the word that EA has the Lord of the Rings IP locked up through the end of next year. With the additional license for the books under their wing and no competition from Vivendi, they have big plans set for their next game inside the franchise world. "The announcement follows EA's previously announced The Lord of the Rings: The White Council, an open world RPG for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. However, with EA making plans for a new The Lord Of The Rings title, the fate of this project, once referred to as the cryptic Project Gray Company, remains uncertain. EA confirmed in early February that the game, while not canceled, had been put on hold." Relatedly, Game|Life notes that one million players will soon be traveling through Middle Earth as the open beta for Lord of the Rings Online gets underway. If you signed up to get in, you probably will. Update: 03/30 04:00 GMT by Z: The text referring to the White Council game was edited on the Gamasutra story, and here as well to reflect that.

jazzbazzfazz writes: It seems that some students in Virginia are not happy with the anti-plagiarism service Turnitin. The company checks prose submitted by its customers for signs that it has been copied in whole or part by comparing it to a large database of works that it maintains.
Trouble is, it also adds the submitted prose to its files and stores it for use by the company in future scans, which the students feel is illegal use of their copyrighted materials. I think they've got an excellent case, especially since they seem to have prepared for this eventuality: they're A-students, never been accused of plagiarism, and they formally copyrighted their papers prior to their submission to Turnitin.
Anyone out there know there copyright laws?

An anonymous reader writes: California Secretary of State Debra Bowen is proposing tough new standards on touchscreen voting machines. From the article: "For the first time, California is demanding the right to try hacking every voting machine with red teams of computer experts and to study the software inside the machines, line-by-line, for security holes."

An anonymous reader writes: InfomationWeek blogger Alex Wolfe offers his list of "5 Things Google Must Do To Succeed In 2007". Items include work with rather than against content providers, offer more Web-based apps, and don't get arrogant. Do you agree? What are your Google faves and raves?